Exhibition

Until the middle of the twentieth century the West Side Piers on the Hudson River of Manhattan have been the supply center for the trade from New York. After the decay of the Piers the area developed into a focus of sexual and artistic subcultures.

The Schwules Museum shows PhotographsofGayLiberationandtheNewYorkWaterfront, made by the Jewish photographer and actor Leonard Fink (1930–1992). He was one of the important historiographers of these developments. He recorded the sexualization of the place, which was at the same time the starting point of new artistic interventions, such as Vito Acconci, Godron Marra-Clark, Richard Serra and others, who wanted to get rid of the institutional constraints. They used the interieurs of the deteriorated piers for the authenticity of their installations and performative works.

Fink pictures also document the decay of an architecture on the West-Side of Manhattan, that doesn’t exist anymore today. Its decay brought with it the slow disappearance of these subcultures.